FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
I don't want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past. It's something real and it started more than two years ago.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has issued an open warning that Europe has entered a "pre-war era" and if Ukraine is defeated by Russia, no one in Europe will be able to feel safe.
" I don't want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past. It's true and it started more than two years ago ," he told European media.
His remarks came after a new barrage of Russian missiles were fired in the direction of Ukraine. Russia has intensified its bombing of Ukraine in recent weeks.
Ukraine's air force said it had shot down 58 drones and 26 missiles, and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said energy infrastructure had been damaged in six regions, in the west, center and east of the country.
Tusk, a former European Council president, said Russian President Vladimir Putin had already blamed Ukraine for the jihadist attack on Moscow's Crocus City Hall without any evidence and appeared to feel the need to justify increasingly violent attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine. .
He noted that Russia had attacked Kiev with hypersonic missiles in broad daylight for the first time earlier this week.
He used his first foreign interview since returning to office as Polish prime minister late last year to make a direct appeal to Europe's leaders to do more to strengthen its defences.
Regardless of whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump wins November's US presidential election, he argued that Europe would become a more attractive partner for the US if it became more militarily self-sufficient.
Since Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine, relations with the West have hit their lowest point since the worst days of the Cold War, although President Putin said this week that Moscow had no aggressive intentions toward NATO countries.
The idea that his country would attack Poland, the Baltic states and the Czech Republic for him was "complete nonsense".
But he nevertheless warned that if Ukraine used Western F-16 fighter jets from airfields in other countries, they would become "legitimate targets, wherever they are."
This is not Tusk's first warning of a pre-war era. He gave center-right European leaders a similar message earlier this month.
However, he revealed that Spain's prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, had asked other EU leaders to stop using the word "war" in their summit statements because people did not want to feel threatened. Tusk said he had responded that in his part of Europe, war was no longer an abstract idea.
Calling for urgent military aid to Ukraine, he warned that the next two years of war will decide everything.
" We are living in the most critical moment since the end of World War II ," he said.
What was more disturbing was that he told reporters from some of Europe's biggest newspapers that any scenario is now possible.
He recalled a picture on the wall of his home in Poland showing people laughing on a beach in Sopot, near Gdansk where he was born, on the southern Baltic coast. The image was of August 31, 1939, then a dozen hours later and 5 km away, World War II began.
" I know it sounds devastating, especially for people of the younger generation, but we must mentally get used to the arrival of a new era. The pre-war era ," he warned.
Despite his scathing comments, Tusk was more optimistic about what he called a real revolution in mindset across Europe.
When he was first Polish prime minister, from 2007 to 2014, he said few other European leaders beyond Poland and the Baltic states recognized Russia as a potential threat.
He praised several European leaders and emphasized the importance of security cooperation between Poland, France and Germany, an alliance known as the Weimar Triangle. And he pointed to Sweden and Finland, once paragons of pacifism and neutrality, but now members of NATO./ Adapted "Pamphlet from "BBC"
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